The World Health Organisation has concluded that MBT, a chemical used to manufacture rubber, ‘probably causes cancer’.
MBT is used to make everything from condoms and hospital catheters to baby pacifiers, elastic bands, insoles for shoes and the surface for all-weather sports pitches.
According to a report in The Daily Mail, a group of 24 leading experts from eight countries, who met in Lyon, France to discuss the issue, have now added MBT to the ‘encyclopaedia of carcinogens’.
DM’s Fiona Macrae reports: ‘The rating, as a substance that ‘probably causes cancer’, puts it alongside red meat and only one rung below cigarettes, asbestos and other substances that definitely cause the disease.’
While the risk to the public is said to be low, with factory workers in the rubber industry most at risk, campaigners are encouraging consumers to ask retailers if MBT – full name 2-mercaptobenzothiazole – is contained in products before purchasing them.
Cancers figure among the leading causes of death worldwide, with approximately 14 million new cases and 8.2 million cancer related deaths in 2012. The number of new cases is expected to rise by about 70 per cent over the next two decades.
A 2009 study found that workers exposed to MBT at a rubber chemicals plant in North Wales were twice as likely to develop colon cancer and four times more likely to get bone marrow cancer.
